Wow. It's kind of affirming, in a "We're all being kicked in the figurative gut" sort of way, to see the status messages of my fellow Phans on facebook over the past 24 hours.

I mean, I knew from the word "go" that I am far from alone in my opinion that the ¢om¢a$t-$p€¢ta¢or organ-eye-zation is screwing the fan base royally, plus they're screwing the Flyers into the bargin, with the way they're handling the future of the farm club.

But MY GOSH. I thought *I* was angry, until I saw some of those status messages. Understand, I'm furious to the point where it's a battle to avoid using profanity, and my Facebook friends' posts are making me look indifferent by comparison.

When all this "raze the Spectrum/move the team" news started breaking a year ago, I wished on ¢om¢a$t-$p€¢ta¢or and the ¢ordi$h ¢ompany that they would get back every last particle of angst that they caused the Phantoms fanbase. I figured that way, if they weren't hurting anybody in their decision-making, they' be fine. And if they WERE hurting people, then they'd be running up quite the karmic debt.

An Old Testament parable springs to mind. It's the one that the Prophet Nathan used to rebuke King David. It's the story of a rich man and a poor man: The rich man had many sheep, while the poor man had only one little ewe, whom he cared for greatly. A traveler approached the rich man for food, whereby the man took the poor man's ewe and dressed it to give to the traveler. Hearing this story, David grew angry and replied: "As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this deserves to die! He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity." It's at this point that the prophet Nathan tells King David that HE has behaved exactly like the rich man, by sending a man to die in battle so he could marry the newly-widowed woman the man left behind, and the prophet enumerates the list of ways that David will answer for this sin.

Times change, but human nature doesn't. Corporations, and the people who run them, do the same thing all the time. They love the Almighty Dollar to the point where they don't care about the PEOPLE whose almighty dollars fill their coffers. In this case, ¢om¢a$t-$p€¢ta¢or and the ¢ordi$h ¢ompany are going to slaughter the lamb and sell its meat to pay for a business venture that has lost financial backers in the year since it was first publicly proposed. Does this surprise me? No. I've reached a point where almost nothing surprises me.

But one thing does surprise me. And that's the level of vehemence of the reactions of my fellow Phans on Facebook. If this reflects the level of pain that ¢om¢a$t-$p€¢ta¢or and the ¢ordi$h ¢ompany are bringing about, by killing the lamb that lots of Regular People love for that marginal amount of profit they're likely to gain, OBOY is that karmic debt ever piling up. Wow. Just... wow.